Organized by my colleague, Shubha Ghosh (and starring, among others, CoOp-erator Deven Desai), the goal is important: How do we understand the intergenerational consequences of a legal regime—intellectual property—that is strongly determined by the present, but which has significant, but under-theorized, consequences for the future? Fights about extending the term of the Mickey Mouse copyright—or any set of long-haul rights—don’t just affect my kids, but potentially their kids, their kids’ kids, and so on. These are, in short, really fights about intergenerational equity.

I was only able to hear Michigan’s Peggy Radin (Property Longa, Vita Brevis) and Penn’s Matt Adler (Intergenerational Equity: Puzzles for Welfarists), but as expected, both provided awesome overviews of these sorts of problems. As Radin pointed out, intellectual property (knowledge and information law generally) always involves two types of generational problems: One is temporal (my parents, me, my kids, their kids, etc.); the other is technological (my students barely know from videotape; I will never beat my daughter at any computer game).

Adler explained that it is easy (and perhaps imprudent) to dismiss the utility of welfare economics as a tool to make these sorts of decisions. Certainly, we might say, Benthamite sums of utils could predict little for those not in existence (the future): what would their utility function be, really?

Hope I die before you get old

Yet, he observed, robust and subtle analytic models and conceptual frameworks are being developed by the Sens and Arrows of the world, and they may (if the future is bright) help develop more equitable and effective decision tools for matters with a long temporal reach.

Those who follow state politics may find this all a bit ironic. Wisconsin’s recent election was a decisive victory for Republicans, who captured both houses of the legislature and the Governor’s office on a message which may strain the state’s motto, “Forward.”

If Republicans keep their word, tax breaks for the rich and elderly will replace education and healthcare spending for the young and unborn; fossil fuel (old tech) subsidies will replace biofuel (new tech) development; and the University may have to fight to continue its path-breaking stem-cell research, certainly a way to kill both jobs in the present and medical miracles in the future. This may be good for baby boomers, but isn’t likely so hot for their grandkids.

Hope you die before I get old

Wisconsin’s liberals are, of course, despondent over their loss of power and position. Yet, forecasting and discounting long-term causation are among the things that make questions of intergenerational equity so interesting and difficult. I doubt Newt Gingrich thought in 1994 that the Contract with America would virtually assure Bill Clinton a second term, but today the former seems to have led to the latter. Likewise, it is certain that neither Jeremy Bentham nor Pete Townshend could have predicted the duration of their memetic contributions to today’s discussions about tomorrow. They probably just thought it was all rock and roll.